This is less bragging than it appears. More of an example of the exact situation when this game is at it's best.

I am doing Labyrinth with an Orc Rogue. I found endiswall like immediately and spent most of it being way over confident. I converted every single spell before finding the second boss. It's a wraith. I look at remaining resources and go "welp that's a wipe"(to use MMO vernacular). I decide to push it anyway. I blow a wad of potions on the wraith(whupaz, reflex, quicksilver). Still not enough. I had been avoiding deities because had determined them not useful. (I had GG, and JJ). It occured to me though that I may be able to get enough HP to take a hit from using GG and since I had already blown all my potions for trisword this wouldn't be terrible. I convert, gather hp by clearing popcorn(was not enough for a level up left anyway, I was playing terribly). Just eek over the hp threshold.. but.. now I need to heal. I have enough piety for a protection so I use that. Still need more hp.. I see a couple small unexplored spots and that puts me over the edge. Ok another hit in. But I need one more(so I can finish off with first strike). Despair is kicking in. But wait I left explorable tiles in a subdungeon.. and I have a transmute scroll.. that could get me enough gold to buy something to convert for more piety. Success. Wraith down. Rex is staring at me. Despair kicks in again. But wait! I have yet more resources. If the math works I might be able to pull it off! Up at a gallop I buy a mana pot! I use 2 last blocks of recovery. I blow one last endiswall.. and I still can't take a hit. Now this is where smart turns to luck but I still feel smart for trying. Lets go desecrate JJ for some piety. SUCCESS! Protection later I am punching the boss. One more hit. A shop has a hero's badge. And I can afford it! Hurrah, Rex is dead.

Ok so that was a long block of text with a whole ton of bad play during it and leading up to it. I was not monitoring resources well both in early game and apparently late game. However the sheer amount of things I could manipulate to get to my goal made me feel smart. Eeking out numbers at all corners. It's at these moments that the game is at it's best. It makes me want to do that again, if a little tired from exertion of my brain. I am not sure if the game needs more ways to create these situations or if they exist enough to be ok(the hard part is recognizing them and being persistent enough to see them through). Any way, that was my cool story bro.

xspeedballx wrote:Ok so that was a long block of text with a whole ton of bad play during it and leading up to it.

Nop - was the overall best kind of experience you can have with the game, IMO. Was probably the originaly intended one. It is reliance on a few too efficent practices/combo's that a few dungeons mandate (or used to) that creates a sense of - if you have to "resort" to that - you better reroll. Either that or simply don't notice "bad play" because it leads to an effortless win.

Outside of a few features that are being tossed around (Rogue, BM, Trisword, Warlord, B2P, and maybe 2-3 more, IF), most of the game plays like what you've described - you romp around comfortably, and the game makes you sit up and think if you push it too hard - and if you're observent enough there is ussualy either plenty or just barely enough resources to pull through and feel good about it.

I found endiswall like immediately and spent most of it being way over confident. I converted every single spell before finding the second boss.

Rogues who lack significant HP boosts are highly dependent on damaging spell to soften up enemies. Even ignoring the issue of physical resist bosses who can screw you over, that's a big deal.

I had been avoiding deities because had determined them not useful. (I had GG, and JJ)

Okay, what? Those are the best deities for a Rogue. JJ even gives you the awesome WEYTWUT on signing up. I can understand if you found them both very late in exploration, but if you found one or the other early I'd have jumped on them.

Still need more hp.. I see a couple small unexplored spots and that puts me over the edge. Ok another hit in. But I need one more(so I can finish off with first strike). Despair is kicking in.

The Tormented one has 60% physical resist; using Cleansing to get a magical attack effectively gives you more than double damage against him since he has no magic resist. You could have finished him on the spot with that.

Anyways, good work pulling it off regardless of your mistakes. The freeform nature and ability to solve problems with a variety of different tools is one of the cool things about DD.

1) Oh I KNOW I should have a damaging spell. But I was feeling overconfident. Honestly I also should have been a halfling not and orc(prepped trisword). There was a lot wrong with my play To be fair though by and large I find ENDISWALL to serve a lot of the purpose of a damaging spell for softening up, sometimes better depending on the situation.(Physical resist mobs being the exception.. circle back to overconfident and dumb).

2) Deities I struggle with. I never use JJ. I did find him late, but I had found GG early. However I was tri-swording and historically *I* screw myself trying to grab GG while tri-swording so I ignored him. WEYTWUT generally gets ignored for me as a rogue, unless I am in a maze level without a wall destroying function. I am sure there is deeper thought I will get into on that later.

3) Honestly I forget about cleansing a lot. I really need to stop doing that. That absolutely would have improved the situation if I remembered it existing.

What's interesting as sort of referenced in my post I come from a lot of MMO playing, and most raid encounters are designed with a humungous amount of leeway and room for mistakes. When you first start winning you are minimizing mistakes to the point of just going over the hump. However after a few weeks after you are down to a bare minimum of mistakes you realize how "easy" that fight always was. This game has a similar effect. There are tons of resources, LOTS of things you can do. The run was ideal for a ridiculously easy run for a lot of reasons that I ignored or messed up. However, I manage to eek out a win pulling together what I could find anyway. The game makes you feel smart like that.. (I get the same feeling organizing my raid groups to killing a tough boss by managing every tiny resource I can find.)

paplaukes wrote:I agree, gotta like the scrounging for last remaining resources. That reviewer guy on frontpage put it best:

Alec Meer, rockpapershotgun.com wrote:Where I most enjoy DD is the moments where you seem stuck in an impossible situation, and the everything-must-go desperation which results.

Yeah, crazy uber strategies are fun, but my best memories are from playing Purist and having to deal with a last minute curve ball. Like that time I brought a Rogue into the Labyrinth and found Bleaty on literally the very last square. He could one-shot me, but a last minute conversion to Mystera and mass desecrations let me pull an emergency switch to fireball mode and just barely pull through. Or that time that I was one tile's worth of resources short of beating Ssethno so I did a last minute change to GG and converted EVERYTHING trying to get piety for a single dose of Protection.